C is for Camberwell Fair
The A-Z of Camberwell Online Exhibition
Camberwell Green
The Irish drinker on Camberwell Green,
a wiry tinker of a man,
stepped from the shadow of the plane trees
on a hot August night and bending his knees
pointed to the software engineer's shoes,
hand stitched and as shiny as the cobbled mews
of London on a rainy summer’s day,
and said in an accent cloggy as clay,
"North of Bodmin Moor
those shoes wouldn't take you far".
As the engineer smiled quizzically,
from out of the alley stepped Stefania,
and the Irishman torn
with instantaneous love cried
"Behold! A terrible beauty is born!",
And while big black men drove big black cars
around the Green, I laughed out loud
and shouted, "A poet, a poet!" and he whirled about,
arms spread-eagled and jigged there
on the pavement to some unheard air.
Then crooked, dissembling, he came up beside me
and whispered "Duck!" and I bobbed instinctively:
"Why? Are you going to hit me?"
"O no, I'm just an ordinary Kelly!" he replied
as, Stefania, eyebrows beetling like a Chinese warlord,
strode back to take my arm and pull me forward
to the street light; but he sidled to the left of me
and bending crablike, murmured,
"I just wanted to whisper in your ear....."
- He gesticulated helplessly -
"....Just for a pint to drink here in this wilderness...."
I opened my purse and pressed a heavy coin into his hand.
Like me, he was a poet, a drinker, an exile in a foreign land
Jane Russell 07/06/2020
This poem was written about meeting an Irish homeless man on Camberwell Green in August a few years ago.
He seemed like someone left over from the old Camberwell Fair.
